


bleachless

by KaiFukugawa



Series: sick dog heart [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Dissociation, Frottage, Getting Together, Healing, Healthy Relationships, Hermann is Newt's Favorite Person, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Light Masochism, M/M, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Might add more tags, Panic Attacks, Praise Kink, Psychosis, Recovery, Self-Harm, Therapy, This is pretty dark at the beginning ngl, handjobs, not pr:u compliant, perverse in a vaguely poetic way, probably isn't as fucked up as the tags make it seem
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 18:44:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18394184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaiFukugawa/pseuds/KaiFukugawa
Summary: I am a sick dog with a broken bone. Put me out of my misery.





	bleachless

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written in so long. College is kicking my ass. I'm going to die here. Anyway this was supposed to be a oneshot but uhhhhh got more ideas machine working so. Newt canonly has BPD which makes him a really special character to me so I decided to write a vent fic abt it.
> 
> Also- please send requests god I need to write more.

The first time Newt dissociates, he's sixteen and visiting his father over winter break. He feels his body creak and groan and break, and suddenly, he is not there anymore. The world around him sways hazily, like he's seeing it from underwater until a loud crash breaks him out of it. He blinks at the sound of his father's worried questions as he comes running down the stairs and stares down at the ceramic shards embedded in his palms.

All he's able to think is,  _huh. That was my favorite mug._

He brushes it off as a one time thing, spurred on by mania and too much excitement. His dad asks him if he's been taking his medication, and he lies through his teeth.

When he's back in his dorm and the tremors are a bit more apparent, he chugs an energy drink and pops two sleeping pills.

His mind feels like its splitting apart.

The fifth time it happens is the first time it isn't scary. It's wondrous, mind-bending; he's floating above himself and star bright and everything beneath his eyelids sparks and glows. He laughs and laughs and laughs. He laughs until he's coughing out blood. He laughs until he sobs. There is a bright burning pain inching up his arm like a flame. It feels good, it feels calm— the endorphins hit him and he's drugged.

He crashes like a falling star and can't look at scissors for a week.

After that, he takes his medication for two weeks straight before he stops again. They make his mind feel cottony and adrift— cut loose. He would rather have a mind that's brilliant and untrustworthy than a mind that doesn't work at all.

* * *

He's eighteen when he first consciously puts a knife to his arm. He digs in and the skin-splitting pain is beautiful. He watches crimson well up in detached fascination as the shaking stops. He feels— calm.

He breathes a sigh of relief.

It's a habit he can't stop.

He makes alterations to his skin with a mania bordering on feral. The pocketknife takes permanent place on his nightstand, and the first day he can't find it, he scratches and claws at his skin in a desperate fervor.

Afterwards, looking at the blood on his hands, his heart sinks and the acerbic manic edge comes rushing back.

He is rabid.

He is a sick dog with a broken bone.

His body shakes, and he is weightless.

* * *

When he meets Hermann, he is convinced things will be different. Hermann doesn't care about his psychosis or what he lacks. He cares about his brain, and that's—well, that's the best thing of all. They bounce theories off each other and tease and jab.

It's perfect.

Until it isn't.

The first time he meets Hermann, he goes back to the hotel room and slices ribbons into his skin. The pain that normally would have been so welcome, so calming, does nothing to soothe the red haze in his mind. He rips and tears until he can't see the pale of his arm through the red.

The tears have stopped, leaving him strangely empty.

He rips his shirt off and wraps it around his wounds, and when it bleeds through, he laughs and laughs and laughs.

* * *

The end of the world happens, or begins to at least.

There's no time for feeling anymore, not really. And doesn't that shake him to the core? Because feelings— that's all Newt is. He feels with a burning like acid. To take that away is to take away the core of himself.

But, well, he finds out it's easier to not feel than he thought. The mania is constant, bright and sharp. He can feel his eyes buzzing in their sockets, spit flying from his lips as he rushes through one topic to the next.

He's falling.

He's shaking apart.

The first time the PPDC therapist asks him if he has any thoughts of killing himself, something in his mind clicks.

The pain suddenly becomes about punishment.

He gets the tattoos because they're cruel. He relishes in the sting of it.

He knows he's just asking for it at this point, that it's an excuse for self punishment. For not being better, stronger. Did Monica leave because she could feel the same sickness in him that he had?

On days where he fails and fails and fails, he cuts neatly, carefully into the hide of the monsters on his skin, imagines stripping off his flesh and bones, imagines not fucking breathing anymore. He shakes and sobs and the pain is  _so good._

The day Hermann walks in, he pushes himself away from his desk and promptly vomits in the bathroom sink.

It's fine though. It's okay, really. Because Hermann pushes, Hermann gives as good as he gets. He gives Newt the punishment he deserves, lets Newt howl into the fucking abyss and brings him back and sends him out even further with barbed words and snide insults.

Newt thinks he loves him (knows somewhere that in his stupid sick dog heart, he's always loved him). He also knows that this is as good as it's going to get. Still, he takes himself in hand at night, thinking of Hermann above him and whimpers like a wounded animal.

It's beautiful.

It's passion.

It's perfect.

Hermann screams at him for mistakes, for grinning rabidly when he shouts back, for being. It makes Newt shudder and shake. He's never felt this self-burning devotion and desire for anyone before and knows he will never feel it again. The reedy lines of Hermann's yelling make his mouth wet, make his skin break out in gooseflesh.

( _Disgusting,_ he thinks to himself at night, panting and groaning and smearing the sheets in fresh blood.  _Horrible. You're horrible._ )

Still. He's a little puppy dog for Hermann, is grateful that the other doesn't know that he'd willingly lay at his feet, panting, waiting for any kind of acknowledgement he will give him.

He doesn't run out of an argument until he does.

He doesn't remember what exactly Hermann says, but it's bitter and brutal and scalding. All of the sudden, this isn't fun anymore.

He pushes himself up from his desk and runs from the room. His breath is already coming shorter and the hallway seems to turn. His panting turns into whimpering turns into full shaking as nausea roils through him. It's a sudden, startling realization that Hermann has never, will never feel the world ending devotion that Newt feels, will never feel his heart swell and mouth fill with drool the same way Newt's does when he yells. He will never feel a love that could rend flesh from bone and willingly end worlds like Newt could. Normal people are not like Newt. It's a revelation that his stupid, sick dog heart cannot take.

Newt slams the door to his bedroom and fumbles for something sharp, the first thing he can find. The pocketknife flicks open and digs deep into his thumb, starting a sticky pool of red blood gathering at the crux of his thumb. He digs a bright brand into his wrist so deep that he can see bone— or maybe that's just the white of light bursting behind his eyes. His mind is leaving his body, is fracturing apart, and nothing will remain. The pain is drowned out by a deep, fervent need to—

To—

To—

The door slams open.

"Newton, I—," Hermann starts, stopping quickly at the sight in front of him. Newt shakes so hard that the knife falls from his hand. The part of him that's still present notes that there's blood on his floor.

He can vaguely hear someone yelling through his heartbeat in his ears and his steady chant of " _No, no, no, no._ "

"Stitches," the person in his room says. "You need stitches—"

"Don't— I-I don't," he protests, but it just turns into babbles of " _I don't, I don't, I don't—_ " as he curls in on himself.

"Newton," the person— Hermann— says, grabbing his shoulder. Part of Newt wants to lean into the touch. The other part of him screams at the contact, wants to burn every point of contact off.

Hermann hauls him up, unsteady on his injured hip, and Newt keens like a broken animal, sobbing, " _Please don't, please don't._ "

He knows that he's speaking gibberish. (Does he?)

There's a loud creaking and then a sudden gush of cold bursts over him. He gasps.

"Newton," Hermann says, keeping a steady grip on him as the water goes rust colored. "Newton."

Newt takes one look at him through his waterlogged glasses and crumples. Hermann catches him with a grunt.

"I'm sorry," he sobs. "I'm sorry. It hurts. I'm sorry."

Hermann simply grips him through it, not saying a word about the water soaking his corduroys or the sobbing coming from in front of him.

* * *

"Why did you do it?"

Newt is in a cold ball on the bed, staining his sheets with water. The bandages on his arms stain through pink.

Hermann sighs through his nose and tries another angle.

"You know I'll have to tell the Marshall about this."

That earns a flinch from Newt. If he were in any other situation, he would have keened. He would have begged like an animal at slaughter.

Hermann looks around the room and catches sight of the old, still full prescription bottles on Newt's desk. He can feel the other man look at them for a long moment and then turn to look at him, as if confirming. Newt studies the bleedthrough of his bandages.

A cold hand on his knee startles him out of his reverie. He looks up and expects pity, but all he sees is sadness.

"How long?" Hermann asks.

His lip trembles.

"My brain has always been so loud," he choked out. "It starts to tear itself apart."

"Your medication—"

"It makes everything stop. I can't think. I can't not think, I need— I need to—"

Hermann's hand on his arm stops him. Newt spends a long moment staring at the pristine pale next to the pink splotching of fabric.

"It hurts," he breathes, because if he spoke any louder, the tears would come back. "It hurts and it makes it calm. Because I deserve it to hurt."

Hermann's eyes go steely. "You have never deserved to hurt."

Newt shakes his head.

"I do. Because I made my dad unhappy— because my mom left him all because of me, because I'm not the way I should be and I know I'm brilliant, but all my dad wanted was a normal kid. Because I can never do anything right,  and I'm not fast enough to stop the Kaiju, I'm not good enough, I can't do it— Because I hurt you and I like it because it means that at least I exist to you but you hate me anyway and I— I—"

Sobs heave out of his chest.

"I'm sorry," he chokes. "I'm sorry."

"Newton," Hermann tries to say, but Newt cuts him off.

"I'm wrong," he says, blinking past tears. He feels like he's about to throw up. "I'm an animal with a broken bone."

When Hermann says nothing, he continues.

"I-I'm just a sick dog following you around, hoping that you'll yell at me because that means that I'm bad like I  _know_ I am, hoping that you'll— you'll just take me in your hands and pick me apart until I'm nothing anymore—"

"I never meant to make you feel like this," Hermann says. It's a miserable thing. "I was angry. I've...been angry for a long time. I never meant it like this though."

Newt whimpers, and it tears through his throat like a knife. He leans forward and tips his head into Hermann's chest. The other man goes stiff above him, but slowly, cautiously, folds his arms around him.

Hermann's fingers feel like absolution running through his hair, and he cries harder.

"We'll talk to the medical staff about lowering your medication dosage. I'll be there if you want me to."

Newt shakes his head. "I don't want—"

"You have to," Hermann says. His tone brooks no argument. Newt looks him in the eyes, aware of how pitifully small he is in this moment, and nods. Hermann runs a hand through his hair.

"You're touching me," Newt mumbles.

Hermann looks anywhere that isn't Newt.

"Yes, well. Something I get from my mother, I suppose."

It isn't said like a bad thing.

"I'm sorry," Newt says again, but his eyes are beginning to droop.

"It's alright, Newton," Hermann says. "Sleep. We'll go to the medbay when you wake up."

Newton falls asleep with Hermann watching over him.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Send requests at kaifukugawa on tumblr!


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